1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a search system, a server system, and a method of controlling a search system and a server system, and more particularly, to a search technology using sensibility words.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a case in which a product such as a suit is searched for on an electronic commerce (EC) site on the Internet, products can be narrowed down by designating a price, a size, or a color, and the like. For example, if a user designates a color of a desired suit on a web page, a list of suit images related to the designated color is displayed. The user can select a desired suit image from the displayed list of suit images to buy a suit of the selected image.
However, the colors that can be selected by users on an EC site may be limited, and the users may not be able to designate an exact desired color. Further, since a user often chooses a product based on a vague impression at the time of purchase in a real store or the like, it is not necessarily preferable to perform product searching based on a specific color from the viewpoint of encouraging purchase of a product.
In searching for product images based on the color or the like, a product matching a color or an impression actually desired by a user may not necessarily be presented in search results. Therefore, various search technologies based on information other than the color have been proposed.
JP2002-157268A discloses a product information notification system that enables effective presentation to be performed by changing additional information of products for each user. In this product information notification system, basic information of a product group to which the user tries to refer is selected from a product information database in which basic information (for example, a product name, a size, a color, and a manufacturer name) of each product is stored, and the selected basic information is provided to the user. Further, corresponding additional information is selected from the additional information database based on profile information of a user, and the selected additional information is provided to the user.
JP2011-065499A discloses an image search apparatus that performs searching using keywords including sensibility words. In this image search apparatus, acquired keywords are divided into nouns and sensibility words, a feature amount to be used for searching is acquired from a sensibility word and a noun-feature amount database based on a combination of the noun and the sensibility word, and an image is searched for using the acquired feature amount.